Asteroseismology and the Solar-Stellar Connection

TL;DR

The paper discusses how the Kepler mission will use asteroseismology to characterize Sun-like stars, enhancing our understanding of stellar dynamos and aiding in exoplanet detection.

Contribution

It provides an overview of Kepler's mission, data, and its potential to improve solar and stellar dynamo models through asteroseismic analysis.

Findings

Kepler will produce data to characterize Sun-like stars.

Asteroseismology can improve understanding of stellar dynamos.

Development of a stellar modeling pipeline is underway.

Abstract

In March 2009, NASA will launch the Kepler satellite -- a mission designed to discover habitable Earth-like planets around distant Sun-like stars. The method that Kepler will use to detect distant worlds will only reveal the size of the planet relative to the size of the host star, so part of the mission is devoted to characterizing other suns using asteroseismology. In this proceedings, I give a broad overview of the Kepler mission and the data that it will produce, with a special emphasis on how it could improve our understanding of solar and stellar dynamos. I conclude with an update on the development of a stellar modeling pipeline for interpreting asteroseismic observations.